Cook Islands marine conservationist wins environmental prize

A Cook Islands marine conservationist who received a global environmental award says she hopes it will bring more attention to protecting the Pacific Ocean.

Jacqui Evans led a five-year campaign to push for sustainable management of all of the 1.97 million square kilometres of the country's ocean territory, including the designation of marine protected areas, or MPAs.

This led to the Marae Moana Act, which established the MPAs and banned large-scale commercial fishing and seabed mining within 50 nautical miles of the 15 Cook Islands.

Transcript

JACQUI EVANS: It's a surreal feeling really, because all of a sudden I'm on the world stage. Ah so yeah I'm not entirely used to that feeling. Otherwise it feels great. It's really nice to be recognised.

TIM GLASGOW: It was a five-year project to set up those MPAs. Tell me how that started.

JE: It was actually Kevin Iro's idea. Kevin is the rugby league celebrity so he actually came home from overseas and moved back to the Cook Islands with his family and realise that our marine environment needs attention and he came up with the idea to set up this park and approached and said "what kind of assistance we might need at the NGO I was working for at the time and that really inspired me - meeting with him. And I really wanted to help, so that sort of put me on to the path of wanting to make it work.

TG: And you've talked about how your work has been inspired by the children of the Cook Islands and leaving a clean ocean for them.

JE: Oh, absolutely, that's something I've always believed all of my life anyway. I've always worked in marine conservation. Since high school I wanted to be a marine biologist and i went to university to study marine biology and I graduated with environmental scion and geography degrees, so have always been working in the marine field. So yeah, I have been a mother, my son is 21 years old, so I am very concerned about the future for our children.

TG: In terms of the award, obviously it's a really big deal in the environmental world, Dan like you were saying puts your work and the project on the world stage. Moving forward what do you think this means for awareness for marine conservation, not only in the Cooks, but the wider Pacific?

JE: I think it's going to, as it has, draw a lot of people offering help and assistance. And also because Marae Moana is a model for the Pacific I can see that it will benefit the Pacific region as a whole in terms of the long-term sustainability of our whole marine environment and resources.

TG: What's the future for the project now that is has this awareness around it?

JE: It's very import to the Prime Minister, Kevin Iro, the traditional leaders and myself that we don't make this a paper park, that we actually make the Maraa Moana a really effective park. So we're working now on regulations and we're going to start the marine spatial planning process to further plan the ocean territory areas for use and the different types of use. So that's what we're working on right now.